Meet Your Neighbors

Kris Krouse: nurturing a trust

Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Kris Krouse demonstrated both his leadership skills and his love of the outdoors. Though his family had no interest in nature, he managed to pry his friends from their video games to join him in exploring the neighborhood yards and alleys that were the closest thing he had to wilderness. When he was ten, a friend’s family took him to the Indiana Dunes, his first formal trip into nature.

Little did he know that the area was also his destiny. Fifteen years later, he became executive director for the Shirley Heinze Land Trust, which was started in 1981 to acquire and preserve natural lands in the south Lake Michigan watershed. The trust now owns 11 preserves in northwest Indiana, and protects several rare dune, fen, and savanna habitats. Krouse’s priority is creating “an environment that protects our natural resources for the sake of everyone’s well-being and for future generations.”

Krouse focused his environmental interests early, studying carcinogens in river water when he was only in high school. After earning an MBA from Indiana University Northwest in Gary, he spent several years as a project manager for an environmental firm.

The Heinze Trust hired him in March 2005 when he was only 25. Since then, the organization has doubled its staff, volunteers, operating budget, and donors. Krouse is modest about his role, crediting mentors such as former Woods Fund director Jean Rudd (who currently represents the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation in the Calumet region) for guidance with fundraising. The trust’s internship programs, workdays for college students, and education and outreach to the Boy Scouts and other community groups have created a corps of committed volunteers.

“By making volunteers more educated, they become more invested in the work and tend to come back for more,” says Krouse.

His board of directors is not the only group that’s been impressed: in 2007, Krouse joined 11 other honorees in receiving the State of Indiana’s Governor’s Award for Tomorrow’s Leaders.

Krouse makes his home in Valparaiso, Indiana, with his wife, Heidi and children Jak and Abigail, who like collecting bugs and rocks. He enjoys the ease of being able to walk “nearly everywhere,” from their home to the heart of town.

Asked what he might say to trust namesake Shirley Heinze if she were alive today, Krouse said he would let her know that her legacy is making a positive, lasting impression on our natural world and on the many people throughout the region whom she appreciated during her lifetime.

— Paula McHugh